Our Death Toll Is Incomprehensible, How Do We Cope?
A hospice social worker’s advice on how to process
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Everyone dies — and yet, no one wants to talk about that. Even as we continue to find ourselves in a pandemic with a death toll so destabilizing, so different from the familiar I face as a hospice and palliative care social worker. We’re dying, and we’re grieving, and there is no end in sight. I write this as a call to soothe — to offer a space to this grim, untranslatable experience.
In my work, I have witnessed thousands of deaths over the past 21 years — all within a 30-mile radius of Los Angeles. I have sat with those in transition and those who have just died. I have calmed patients and families in crisis. I have joined with centenarians, babies, children, teens, adults, brand-new parents, veterans, newlyweds, Holocaust and internment camp survivors, the newly retired, political leaders, celebrities, royalty, doctors, CEOs, artists, healers, musicians, and hermits.
One thing I know is that death is in the back of our minds constantly — but we rarely allow ourselves to think of it consciously. Despite the fact that we will all eventually experience death, the dying are one of the most underrepresented populations. We don’t speak their realities, we don’t convey their perspectives.
Covid-19 has changed that for many of us. As the world staggers through a global pandemic, the magnitude of which hasn’t been seen in a century, death is suddenly an everyday, top-of-mind experience. Each of the 200,000+ U.S. Covid-19 deaths and counting has affected dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of people who love them. The impact is oceanic.
For a society so uncomfortable cohabitating with death, how do we process this sudden confrontation with death and dying?
I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned in my two decades of this work, as a kind of field guide for death in a pandemic. What follows are tools for Covid-19 patients and their families to begin to reconfigure and…
